Linguistic Anthropology

Sir William Jones

Recognized the systematic relationship between Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin, establishing the Indo-European language family.

Ferdinand de Saussure

Structuralism founder; separated the language system from its use.

Franz Boas

Founder of American Linguistic Anthropology. Demanded that languages be described on their own terms (relativistic approach).

Noam Chomsky

Proposed that language is an innate biological endowment.

Eric Lenneberg

Postulated a fixed time window for native acquisition due to brain maturation.

George Lakoff

Leading Cognitive Linguist; critiques Chomsky by arguing that syntax is not autonomous but rooted in semantics and cognitive experience.

Phonology

The study of speech sounds (phonemes).

Morphology

The study of word structure and formation.

Syntax

The study of sentence structure.

Semantics

The study of meaning.

Linguistic Anthropology

The study of language as a key element of culture and social life.

Universal Grammar (UG)

The innate set of principles and constraints common to all human languages.

Poverty of the Stimulus

The argument that the limited, imperfect input children hear is insufficient to explain the complex grammar they acquire, therefore requiring an innate UG.

Langue (System)

The abstract, collective social system of rules and vocabulary (the object of study).

Parole (Use)

The concrete, individual act of speaking or using the language.

Core Vocabulary

A small, stable set of words (e.g., body parts, low numbers) highly resistant to change, used to study time depth and relationships between languages.

Sound Shift (Grimm's Law)

Systematic changes in consonants that differentiate language families (e.g., $p$ in Latin changing to $f$ in English).

Productivity

The open-ended capacity to generate and understand an infinite number of novel sentences from a finite set of parts.

Duality of Patterning

Language is structured on two levels: a meaningless level (phonemes) and a meaningful level (words/morphemes).

Vocal Tract Evolution

The lowering of the larynx in Homo sapiens (over the last $ ext{~}100,000$ years) provided the necessary anatomical structure to produce the wide range of sounds needed for articulated speech.

Primate Experiments

While primates showed success with semanticity (learning many words/signs) and some displacement, they consistently failed to master productivity and the complex syntax of human language.

Linguistic Anthropological Goal

To document non-Western languages and understand how language is used in social interaction and how it shapes a group's worldview (relativism).

Phones

All the speech sounds used in a language.

Phonetic analysis

The detailed study of the sound system of a language.

Vowels

Sounds produced by allowing the airstream to pass through the mouth without significant blockage.

Consonants

Sounds produced by means of a partial or complete blockage of the airstream.

Phoneme

The minimal functional unit of sound; a difference in phoneme results in a difference in meaning (e.g., /p/ and /b/ are distinct phonemes because pat and bat mean different things).

Allophone

A variant pronunciation of a single phoneme that does not change the meaning of the word (e.g., the aspirated $[p^h]$ in pin and the unaspirated $[p]$ in spin).

Complementary distribution

The rule that states where two allophones occur: if one sound occurs in a certain position, the other does not (e.g., the aspirated /p/ only occurs at the beginning of a word).

Voiced/Voiceless

Classifications based on whether the vocal cords are vibrating or not.

Diphthong

A vowel in which the tongue position moves from one vowel position to another during its articulation (e.g., the $ay$ in say).

Point of Articulation

Where the airstream is obstructed or modified in the vocal tract.

Manner of Articulation

How the airstream is obstructed or modified.

Labial

Bilabial: Both lips touching. $[p]$, $[b]$ in pin, bin.

Plosive/Stop

Complete stoppage of the airstream. $[p]$, $[b]$ in stop.

Dental

Labiodental: Lower lip/upper teeth. $[f]$, $[v]$ in fun, vine.

Fricative

Produced by means of a partial constriction of the airstream. $[f]$, $[ heta]$ in sun, thin.

Alveolar

Tongue touching upper teeth. $[ heta]$, $[ ext{eth}]$ in thin.

Affricate

Combination of a plosive and a fricative. $[ ext{check}]{t}$, $[ ext{check}]{d}$ in fads.

Flap

A quick flapping action of the tongue. Italian $[r]$ in arido.

Palatal/Velar

Velar: Tongue and soft palate. $[k]$, $[g]$ in king, give.

Lateral

Airstream escapes over the sides of the tongue. $[l]$ in love.

Nasal

Air passes through the nasal passage. $[m]$, $[n]$ in mom, nine.

Morpheme

The smallest meaningful unit of language.

Free Morpheme

A morpheme that can stand alone as a complete word (e.g., read, walk, dog).

Bound Morpheme (Affix)

A morpheme that cannot stand alone and must be attached to another morpheme.

Prefix

A bound morpheme attached before the root (e.g., un- in unhappy).

Suffix

A bound morpheme attached after the root (e.g., -s in dogs or -ed in played).

Circumfix

A morpheme that attaches both a prefix and a suffix to a root (e.g., i-...-o in Chickasaw, or the root $ ext{fumikad}$ becomes $ ext{ifumikadul}$ to be strong).

Allomorphs

Variant forms of a morpheme (e.g., the plural morpheme $/ ext{s}/$ has the allomorphs $[ ext{s}]$ in pots, $[ ext{z}]$ in loads, and $[ ext{epsilon z}]$ in lapses).

Syntactic Analysis

The grammatical breakdown of sentences into their component parts.

Sentence Components

Sentences are generally composed of a Subject (the actor) and a Predicate (the verb and its object/complement).

Word Order

The sequence of words carries meaning and is a major component of syntax.

Grammatical Analysis

The systematic study of the forms, words, and structure of sentences to determine what they mean.

Plato

Debated the nature vs. convention of language; defined language as logos (reason/expression), noting its potential for deception.